Dozens of US Military personnel spotted on Nazi networking site

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-group watchdog organization based in Alabama, will present documentation to Congress on Friday about the presence of active duty military personnel on the white supremacist social networking site newsaxon.org. On that website, SPLC spotted 40 users who claim to be serving in the military, an apparent violation of Pentagon regulations prohibiting racist extremism in the ranks.

Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report, a magazine produced at the law center, [said] "The Pentagon really has shrugged this off and refused to look at this in any serious way."

On the newsaxon.org website, which Potok termed "a racist version of Facebook run by the National Socialist Movement," many participants list their branch of service, base location and hometown on colorful pages festooned with Nazi art and Confederate battle flags. Some say they have served or will soon be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Several include pictures of themselves in camouflage combat uniforms.

One participant under the username "WhitePride85," who said he is a 24-year-old staff sergeant from Madison, Wis., wrote: "I have been in the Army for over 5 years now ... I am a SSGT ... I have been in Iraq and Kuwait ... I love and will do anything to keep our master race marching. I have been a skinhead forever."

Screengrab: In his "about me" section, newsaxon.org user "SoldatAMG" describes himself as a "Sergeant in USMC stationed at Camp Lejeune (...) recently returned from my 3rd trip to Iraq. I fight every day to stem the tide of multicultturalism and to ensure that my children have a better world. SIEG HEIL!"

I guess what I’m saying is, until Neo-Nazis are an obviously dangerous and cohesive threat, it’s probably no more dangerous than Neo-Nazis being allowed to march is Poughkeepsie. That being said, what is the problem here, that Neo-Nazis exist in America, or that Neo-Nazis exist in the USM? I think a more stringent interview process would deal with this, and obviously commissioned officers would have to be interviewed and back-checked thoroughly (if they aren’t already, I have no experience with this).

On the more pragmatic side, as long as the USAF doesn’t have many Nazis in (and I mean as pilots and maintainers) then a few domestic terrorists with sniper rifles will only last as long as it takes the Pentagon to authorize an air strike on whatever farm house they hole up in. Thats the current de facto strategy for militant extermination in Iraq anyway.

A 24 year old staff sergeant? That’s pretty unlikely. That guy has probably never been in the army, just a blow hard.
That said, I have no trouble believing that some of the men cliaming to be in the Army actually are.
A sad state of affairs.

They don’t seem to have a problem with discharging decorated war veterans who happen to be gay. What’s the count now, 12,000+? I’d say that’s a lot of boots…

It doesn’t make much sense from our point of view, but it’s not without precedent. In the Civil War they needed the manpower enough that they allowed black soldiers to serve, but only in segregated units, presumably so that the white soldiers didn’t get their sensibilities offended, or whatever. In the case of gay soldiers, I’m guessing that they must feel that heterosexual soldiers today are no more tolerant than white soldiers were in the 1860s.

Or maybe there really are a lot more nazis than we know, and the army doesn’t want to piss them off. After all, these particular soldiers idolize and emulate a group of people who were known to follow orders, and they definitely have no qualms about killing people that the US goes to war with, who usually are not English speaking white folks.

This is a serious problem but I think it speaks volumes that the posters here are treating it in a serious way. Yes, there was serious support for fascists in the US in the thirties and early forties – as there was in a lot of countries, including Britain. There are still pockets of Neo-nazis in all sorts of countries but while people treat the problem seriously and thoughtfully like the posters here I feel that civilisation is in safe hands.

About 15 years ago, I was a shaved-head angry music listening yoot. Within a couple months of joining the military, I was approached by a group of guys who eventually asked me to “join them.”

Sadly, liking angry music and going bald at 18 suggested to them that I was just as stupidly intolerant and bigoted. One guy even bragged that his grandfather was SS during WWII.

It made me sick. I told them they made me sick. Just being near them made me feel contaminated because they were antithetical to many of the reasons I joined up in the first place. In retrospect, I realize I probably came very close to having my ass handed to me on a plate.

I draw some consolation from the fact that while these guys were not swastika-tattoo festooned foam-at-mouth public haters, their own beliefs meant an unsustainable balancing act when it came to serving the needs of a multi-cultural military force. To a one, they were all convicted or discharged for non-racist reasons within a year or two.

Granted, this was in the Canadian Forces but some differences aside, I still retain some hope that the bulk of the enlisted and officers of the US Forces are good people and are likewise disgusted by racism. (And yes, I know this sounds like an open invite for the anti-war protesters to say all military people are fundamentally bad people, but hey, dude, just let it go for another thread.)

@ Failix: I agree that your hypothesis should explain much of the disinterest of communists toward the Forces. I’d still contend that for some of them the defense of the country wins over their social ideals. Anecdotically, Joseph McCarthy thought that there was “commies” in the Army too. He likely thought that their motives were different though.

@ 79: actually, choosing to go to war is still the doing of the politicians in the US. That is one thing, among a few others, that should elicit some real respect for the military in the US: look around the World and count your blessings.

@ Error 404: to show that there are no limits to the flexibility of human stupidity, the BNP includes many members with Jewish ancestry…

on the one hand, it is an absurdly small population, dilluted in a far larger and understanding armed forces. and any active member who offers a photo, hometown, branch of service, and where they are based are probably exaggerating their duties to brag to the neo nazi’s. ie, i’m sure there are more cooks and mechanics than frontline infantry or special forces. i’m putting them in or around the mental capacity of ticket stubb collector at the cinema.

on the other hand, racist/psycho ex-military men? it only takes one to fuck everything up.

What worries me is the potential for neo-nazi recruitment amongst soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. I imagine a combo of a limited education and fighting against people of another race and culture, would make you more susceptible to racist stupidity.

“A 24 year old staff sergeant? That’s pretty unlikely. That guy has probably never been in the army, just a blow hard.
That said, I have no trouble believing that some of the men cliaming to be in the Army actually are.
A sad state of affairs.”

6-7 years to E-6, during a war? Not impossible. In fact, I knew plenty of E-6s who were 24-25 years old when I was in and that was during the peace and love Clinton years…

I’m less concerned about a few neo-nazis in the ranks than I am about premillenarian dispensationalists at higher levels of the officer corps. The neo-nazis might produce another McVeigh (who will hopefully be picked up by law enforcement this time), but the religious nutters are actively trying to re-shape the character of the armed services.

When President Harry Truman, as Commander In Chief of the armed forces, ordered the racial integration of the services in 1948 it changed everything.* True, the actual implementation was slow, but it was sped up by the outbreak of the Korean War two years later. We used to joke that the closer you got to the shooting, the darker the troops got; quite suddenly all men were brothers.

The military is the strongest force against racist attitudes in our society. It’s probably impossible to harbor such feelings towards others when your life depends on them. You can bring it to boot camp, nourish it in garrison, and harbor it in service battalions; but when the shooting starts, racism is usually the first battlefield casualty.

(*He did this six months before the elections, despite a warning from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he was committing political suicide. It ranks as one of the bravest acts by an American president.)

As a skinhead of 25 years standing, can I please point out that you can’t be a skinhead and a racist.

I know this is a major point of contention among your community, but the sad fact is that not all people share the same definition of “skinhead.” That’s not fair to you, but it means the term may now be irreparably tainted by the bigots that usurped it. The same thing happened to the swastika icon and the surname “Hitler.”

Which is not to say you can’t try to take the word back, it just means you’ve got an uphill battle ahead of you. Good luck.

I am not the biggest fan of the military, but come on. SPLC finds 40 soldiers on a bigot social networking site and everyone assumes the DoD is welcoming neo-nazis. Is there any proof that DoD is shrugging this off, or did they just just shrug Mark Potok because, well they are the military, and transparency has never been their strong suit. The one person on the NewSaxon site the author was able to contact said he kept his beliefs to himself, until he revealed them to a DoD psych, after which he was sent home.

As has been mentioned, checking every soldiers background deep enough is difficult, but I don’t see any proof that DoD is neglecting this.

The thing is, it’s 40 people *from this site* who claim to be in the military. That doesn’t add up to 40 nazis in the military, does it? It’s just an indicator.

I can see that there *might* be circumstances where straight soldiers *might* feel awkward enough around gay colleagues that it would impair battleworthiness. I doubt it, but I’m willing to concede the possibility.

The difference here is that being gay is an identity thing — who you *are*. Being a white supremacist is an action thing — what you *do*. Considerably more important to vet these people, even if you don’t support gay people in the military.

A white supremacist in the military would have a hell of a time clinging to his or her idiotic beliefs (or, conversely, staying out of the brig) in such a multicultural, merit based organisation. In my time in the service I never met anyone who came out as a nazi – and I look about as cracker-white aryan as they come.

15 days out of the military, OTOH, at a party full of Seattle college kids, I had a 23 year old douchebag complaining to me that he couldn’t get an internship with the State Department. “because DC was full of n—-rs who look after their own”

That said, it’s nice to see the anti-military prejudices aired so freely by the users of this website. The economic background that some of us grew up in doesn’t allow us to spend our formative years farting around – some people have to catch up on the head start on life provided to privileged suburban brats and the US military (for better or largely for worse) is the best welfare system that this country provides.

Speaking of racism and racists–why are so many people still so filled with so much hate toward so many other people? I just don’t understand it. It’s sad. There are so many other things they could be spending their time doing. There’s so much beauty in life. Why waste it in hate? If they believe in God, do they really think their god would hate? Why would they think that?

The reason there are no communists in the army are IMO different. While the US forces is a perfect organization for racists, rednecks and nationalists (often the same person),it wouldn’t make sense for hardcore communists to defend a system they want to get rid of in the first place.
Communists simply *don’t want* to join the army out of ideological reasons (among others often anti-militarism). Right-wingers *want* to join the army because of ideological reasons.

I remember seeing an article about this in Rolling Stone a year or two into the war in Iraq, about how neo-nazis were joining the army specifically to receive training and actual combat experience. The big clue that this was taking place at the time was the nazi / white supremacist graffiti showing up on walls in Baghdad.

Their network within the military has been deeply entrenched for a long time now, and getting rid of them all would mean a lot less boots on the ground, so the brass is loath to do it.

As an American, I have found this personally disturbing because I think one of the US’s better moments was when we overcame our isolationism and helped defeat the Nazis in WWII (of course we got into the war very late, and it took the Japanese attack on the naval base in Hawaii to do it, we were not proactive about it). Nazi ideology, for many reasons, is quite hideous. How can Americans embrace…. well ok I get it, they don’t look at it that way, to them it is about race and ideology. American neo-Nazis are disturbing for many reasons (60-70 years ago, this would have been treason, and one of our foundational beliefs is that all men [people] are created equal).

It’s not at all surprising. Not because anyone who joins the military is a fascist or a violent racist or something, but because if you are, it’s an obvious career choice. And there’s really no feasible way to keep them out with anything approaching 100% effectiveness, so there you have it.

Over the last few years the US military has been granting waivers to recruits who normally would have been rejected for criminal or psych histories. From 2004 to 2006 the military took in 100,000 soldiers who might previously been rejected.

There has always been a problem with hate, extremist, and criminal groups joining the US (and other countries) military. KKK, Black Panthers, Skinheads, Crips and Bloods, MS-13, you name it. If you don’t want them there, they probably want in.

The US Military does not *extensively* screen recruits – that sort of screening comes with high security jobs, but it’s impractical (or at least, very expensive) to do to everyone. And even well done screenings can easily miss things, if someone wasn’t very open with family / neighbors / the friends the investigators happen to actually interview. TS clearance and the like want to make sure that the person really is who they say, not some sleeper agent, and that they are fundamentally honest. But that’s honest as far as people can tell – we can’t read minds or souls.

We should not be tolerant of dangerous groups organizing inside the military, and they already pay attention to that. But what people believe as individuals is pretty hard to watch well enough to ensure none of them ever end up in the ranks.

SPLC and others would cover this better if they linked back to the press coverage of the criminal gangs “infiltrating” (joining for training) the military in the 1990s, and the first round of skinhead problems in the military in the 1980s, and the histories of earlier problems further back. Problem’s always there. It’s just which angle of it is visible at the moment (or, particularly bad at the moment, if it gets out from under reasonable control).

So neo-nazis sign up for active duty, thus neo-nazis are more likely to get killed.

I don’t see the downside.

Apart from the Afghani and Iraqi civilians that must deal with the dickheads, of course.

If it makes more people hate Americans then it’s not really a good thing is it? How many civilians, when dealing with a soldier with these beliefs, come out of it thinking “That guy was probably just a bad apple, and not at all representative of the US military at large”?

Some maybe in the military but I’d guess a large amount of the supposed military folks on this site are fakers. And real racists hopefully have a hard time or wise up when they are put in units regardless of the races they prefer to serve with.

I don’t think this is a problem of organization-wide scope for the army. Many of the army’s employees are young and uneducated. Some of them are going to claim to be neo-nazis. That’s just the way things go.

I would imagine if you polled Hardees employees you might get a similar result.

I bet Ixty’s experience is more representative. I have a hard time believing that the higher-ups in the military are turning a blind eye to neo-nazi idiots, partly because racism is poison for morale and unit cohesion, and partly because a lot of officers and — perhaps more importantly — senior noncommissioned officers are not white.

Wow. Boing Boing thread recapitulates the rise of the Third Reich. My friend’s mother grew up in Germany in the 20s and 30s. These comments are exactly what Germans said then. “No big deal.” “There aren’t that many of them.” “I’m sure that someone is handling the problem.”

@#13 No. Sorry. IT doesn’t work like that. There is no “moving on.” You cannot tolerate or condone hate speech out of sheer laziness. Let’s say it’s 45 today, what about tomorrow when they convince the new private to join. And then next week, they find a couple more? Do you get it yet? Do you see the problem?

Our fathers and grandfathers died fighting the nazi’s, and you’re going to sit back and say it’s okay for them to infiltrate our military? As a military man you should feel outrage, not indifference! If you think the problem, or the threat goes away just because you ignore it, then you’re not thinking straight.

And at the risk of sounding like an old granny, you really should be ashamed of yourself for letting laziness and indifference cloud your judgment. For shame!

There are gangs in the Army, too. About a year ago there was a big shakeup at my local post: about a dozen arrests for people recruiting soldiers into the Crips, and for cooking meth in on-base housing. The worst kind of people still manage to get into the military sometimes, but the military works constantly to keep it under control.

In the 1930s before the Nazi horrors were widely known, there were even Swastika banners lining Market Street in San Francisco for some occasion.

Being anti-Semitic was much more common in the U.S. before WWII. My Grandma lived in suburb of Chicago that didn’t allow Jews. Many neighborhoods throughout the U.S. banned Jews back then, including in Los Angeles.

GLASS HALF-FULL, HALF-EMPTY SPIN
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“40 users who claim to be serving in the military” is a very tiny percentage of the massive U.S. military.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that same site, newsaxon.org, has 40 members who work at Walmart.

The U.S. military is so diverse, I bet more borderline racists (not the demented hardcore ones) change their minds after serving with people of other races than tip to the dark side of the force (no pun intended).

How do you know? It’s not like they go around advertising what they really are, especially since many of their superior officers are among the very groups they despise. They don’t all get swastika tattoos (those are the guys who don’t give a f@#k and end up in jail), the rest keep quiet and blend in with society (it’s not like they have much choice).

But I get the point: it’s not likely white supremacists are anything more than a tiny minority in the armed forces (I’ll bet there are STILL more closeted gays in the military than white supremacists, even now.) What is sinister is that they are joining for real-world experience in killing and military operations. Do we want to give free sniper training to men who would like Obama in their sights?

Does anyone else see a problem in trying to fight guerrillas with such an army? Guerrilla war is political, foremost (which is why the Western reliance on sophisticated killing technology has done so much to ensure Western military failures – Osama badly needs Obama’s predator drones). How do you win a political contest when the face of occupation thinks of the locals as sand-n*gg*rs?

I have no idea how widespread these supremacists are in the military – but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are more widespread in the extensive mercenary forces attached to the US military. Blackwater massacring indiscriminately at a crowded Baghdad intersection – does anyone remember that?

This was a problem back in the ’90s — when I studied radical domestic movements and their antecedents — and has accelerated in recent years, as has the more general problem of gang members in uniform. Last time I looked at the data, there was definitely a higher incidence of white supremacists and radical right-wingers in the more elite infantry combat units (Burmeister and Wright, for example, who were with the 82nd ABN). However, it should be noted that whites are overrepresented in combat units in the military, so this may be an artifact.

DoD has been worried for several years about the best way to screen out potential radicals of all stripes from the recruiting process, in part because unit loyalty and military culture makes it very hard to find and deal with right-wing radicals once they’re in uniform. However, increased recruiting goals in a tougher environment directly conflicts with careful screening and rejection processes, so radicals can slip through without any problems (often aided and abetted by recruiting officers, as documented in WaPo).

As Ill Lich points out, the real danger is not in the percentage of radicals in the military: it’s that one is still too many. Imagine if the headlines read, “Dozens of US Military Personnel Spotted on al-Qa’ida Website:” there would be (justifiably) an immediate outcry, Congressional investigations, and so on. Radical rightists are just as dangerous, as hard to predict (vide “leaderless resistance”), and a whole lot closer to home. Giving these guys combat experience, access to military-grade arms, security clearances and specialized training is tantamount to training up a new generation of domestic terrorist leaders on the taxpayer dime.

Interesting to think about closeted gays in the military. I’m sure there have always been gays in the military, since back when “gay” still just meant “happy.” But I heard about heterosexual guys claiming to be gay in the Vietnam era just to get out of the the draft. The corporal Klinger character on MASH was a cheesy version of this stereotype. But on that PBS documentary from last year about the Nimitz aircraft carrier (called “Carrier,” I think) there was a guy from Oklahoma who wanted an early out from his enlistment contract. He loudly and annoyingly told everybody that he was a racist. Sure enough, the captain kicked him out of the Navy.

I’m sure there are some jerks in the military who think of themselves as neo-nazis. But if they’re caught coming out with skinhead pride, like these newsaxon.org fools, they’re in a position similar to somebody in the 50’s military who got outed as a “homosexual pervert.”

I also spent a few years in the Army. In my time I ran across gang members, drug addicts, and more than one swastika tattoo. It is part of the culture. Almost anything is permitted as long as you can keep knowledge of it from going more than one rank above you.

I gotta say, as terrible as it is seeing members of America’s military proclaiming their love of the Furher, outing them like this is probably a bad idea.

Extrememist ideology is characteristically defined by conspiracies, how schemers with incompatible belief systems are plotting to persecute the extremeist, steal his or her economic potential, remake their homeland into an unrecognizable ethnic plutocracy, and impregnate their daughters with impure genetic material. These conspiracy beliefs are part of a system that the extremist clings to, where the negative outcomes of external events are tied to the actions of the target of their beliefs. For example, when some dude is fired from work for browsing white power web sites all day instead of processing claims at his call center, he blames that guy Meinkowitz in account who he KNOWS is a [ insert racial slur here ] for his firing and knows that, next time he runs into one of those [ insert racial epiteth here ] he’s gonna watch his back and maybe get a few others watching out for his kind too.

If all these combat experienced facist wanna-bes were dishonorably discharged over their despicable racist beliefs and set on the streets of America in desperation, that could be a bad thing for the poor people who have to live near them. I say, keep them in the military, which has the order and lack of individuality that appeals to facists, and just send them to some third world place far out of the mainstream of civilization where we can watch them and make sure they will never get a chance to do much of anything.

“Yeah there are 45 nazis in the 1,500,000 US military. Deal with the nazis and move on.”

That’s the problem here, they’re not. Nobody’s saying that all soldiers are nazis, they’re saying that a disturbing percentage of nazis are soldiers, and that the Pentagon doesn’t give a shit. These people should not be representing us abroad, nor should they be in positions of national security, nor should they be allowed to influence others on the US government payroll.

I use that little burning flag gif all the time. It says “RCP” (Revolutionary Communist Party) on it (I circle my A’s). Of course, I hate nazis more.

Anyway, this is nothing new; many active fascists are ex-military and it makes perfect sense. They want a military dictatorship, right? So they train for it and get used to giving and receiving orders, losing oneself to a pack mentality, etc. Many of their leaders encourage their “stormtroopers” to join the military and keep their beliefs quiet, unless they can find comrades. It’s a real threat – giving fascists weapons training has helped facilitate multiple homicides on numerous occasions. Fascists will always be in any military; get used to it.

Racists and bigots of all kind are horrible angry people. However, is there some rule against racists in the military? In a perfect world they would be kicked out but is there any justification for it in the regulations?

If a “yes” answer to the question “are you a Nazi” disqualifies you for service, then anyone who knows that isn’t going to admit it in an interview. Unless you have some foolproof way of tricking people into admitting they’re Nazis?